


Catalyse

by systemscheck



Category: Transformers Animated (2007)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Other, Plug Or Die, Post-Canon, Transformers Plug and Play Sexual Interfacing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:28:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23686924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/systemscheck/pseuds/systemscheck
Summary: Ratchet has always been bad at resisting the allure of handling volatile materials.
Relationships: Lockdown/Ratchet (Transformers)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	Catalyse

Ratchet didn’t even notice the beat-up truck sitting under a dusty tarp until a small reptilian urchin leapt back from the vehicle, hissing unintelligible curses and sucking on a scorched hand. He was already turning towards the source of the pained cry before common sense kicked in. With nothing on organic physiology in his databanks, there wasn’t anything he could do for the wounded three-fingered palm. Still, the instinct to help was hard to override. 

The vendor he had been negotiating with flicked a forked tongue in what looked like amusement. 

“Stupid hatchling,” the vendor said. “That car looks abandoned, but nobody has been able to steal it for cycles.” 

“Really,” Ratchet said, not really paying attention; he was weighing a sachet of powder with a practised hand. “I told you already, I’m not going one credit over fifty per decagram.” 

The people on this planet didn’t even have any use for the compound he was buying. It was only after the establishment of galactic trade that they discovered the immense demand for this industrial by-product, and stopped incinerating the stuff accordingly. Ratchet was doing them a favour by paying for the opportunity to provide waste disposal. 

“You drive a hard bargain. This is the very last of my stock, you know. I have eggs of my own to care for, not that something like you would understand.” The vendor’s pupils narrowed into thin slits. “Eighty. Take it or leave it.” 

Any transaction at this market involved lots of pointless back-and-forth that sorely tested the limits of Ratchet’s patience and made him resolve to make each trip the final one, but a great many important materials were difficult to obtain on Cybertron. Between confronting the red tape necessary to access controlled substances and going to the hassle of travelling offworld, at least the second option gave Ratchet an excuse to let Omega Supreme stretch his legs. Just as he’d feared, the Council had balked at the notion of letting the enormous Sentinel roam free. The weapons loadouts built into his very frame didn’t make for a very good public image, either. Autobots may have been all too happy to build the most intimidating soldiers to wage their wars, but the prospect of allowing these mechs to peacefully integrate into society, no matter how lobotomised, was obviously too much to hope for. After a lot of political wrangling Omega was no longer mode-locked and forced to serve as a mere transport vessel, though with his movements so severely restricted Ratchet wondered if all he had accomplished was widening his cage. 

A random alien’s casual prejudice was the least of Ratchet’s problems. He fished out the requisite number of credit chits from subspace—this being the kind of backwater place where physical currency was still in common use—and tipped them into one of the vendor’s many hands. The money disappeared nearly instantly. 

Ratchet nodded curtly and left, too annoyed to even think of saying thanks. The damn vendors were getting smarter every year, colluding with their counterparts halfway round the universe to fix prices. In this foul mood he marched down the dusty street, not bothering to tamp down the intensity of his field. There wasn’t a lifeform capable of reading such signals in the vicinity, anyway. 

Or so he thought. 

The cracked headlights of that truck flashed, reflecting off a twisted pile of scrap nearby. Ratchet froze. It could just be a trick of the light. His motor relays tensed in preparation to continue moving but for some reason Ratchet cut the power to them. 

The vendor looked up irritably when Ratchet turned up at the stall again. “No refunds, machine man. I’m packing up for the day anyway.”

“The truck over there, have you seen it move?”

No response. Ratchet asked again only to be ignored. In desperation, Ratchet thrust a credit chit into the vendor’s face. 

Ratchet snatched the chit back before it could be accepted. “Start talking.”

“A-a-a,” the vendor complained, but the promise of compensation proved effective. 

Nobody knew when the truck first appeared. When it became obvious that the owner wasn’t coming back, several attempts were made to tow away the thing. All ended up mysteriously unsuccessful. Equipment broke, crowbars dented, and anyone who so much as touched the truck could end up with an injury. The vendor concluded that it was haunted and no good could come of investigating too closely. 

To Ratchet, who hardly believed in ghosts, this all sounded like a bad case of T-cog injury. Mode-locked Cybertronians were hardly defenseless after all, and no-one would allow themselves to become property without a fight. He started towards the supposedly cursed vehicle. 

“Didn’t you listen to anything I just said?” The vendor had stood up to shake a couple of fists at Ratchet, but didn’t dare follow. 

“Yeah, you were very helpful,” Ratchet muttered. He was focusing on tuning his sensors to the finest degree. From the weak flicker the truck was able to muster, it looked like this mech—if it wasn’t merely a perfectly ordinary truck suffering several problems—was running on dangerously low fuel levels. They were probably sliding into stasis already, judging by the thick layer of dust on the tarp covering the hood. 

Ratchet sent a cautious comm message and received no acknowledgement. A disabled commlink meant that energy conservation protocols were at the highest level. There wasn’t much time left to intervene. 

“I’m a medic,” he said aloud. “I’m not going to hurt you.” 

Palms raised, Ratchet approached the silent vehicle, broadcasting all the friendliness he could generate in an otherwise frustrating day. Some pedestrians had stopped to stare at the crazy alien, not that he noticed. 

Ratchet yanked the filthy tarp off in one quick motion. “Can you open your fuel cap? I can manually unlock it, but you have to let me do so without shocking me.” 

Did he imagine it, or was there the barest hint of acknowledgement in the tilt of the truck’s sideview mirrors? Had the shattered windshield trembled on a breezeless day? 

No opposition was encountered as Ratchet worked the fuel cap open. He fitted a hose between the cap and the emergency cube of energon he always carried around out of habit, carefully watching as the pink liquid trickled inside. Now was the moment of truth. Non-sentient machinery always reacted badly to the fuel of his kind. 

The cube drained. Ratchet reached out to detach the hose, though before he could do so an incredibly loud noise startled him back. When his audials stopped ringing he started to smile. It was the sound of an engine restarting after a long, long time. 

This small quantity of energon was enough to revive the truck, though he would need far more to drive. Ratchet fitted a tow line between them and started heading for the field he’d agreed to rendezvous with Omega Supreme. When the inhabitants of this planet blocked his way with their gaping he whooped his sirens to clear a path. 

“Hello there,” Ratchet said, and tapped the base of Omega’s foot when the gigantic mech didn’t respond. 

“Ratchet! I was touching the clouds on this planet. They’re so soft and moist. Can we bring some back home?” 

“Cybertron’s atmospheric composition doesn’t favour precipitation,” Ratchet said, belatedly realising that he was too impatient to provide an answer within Omega’s comprehension. “I’ll explain things later, but there’s someone who needs my help now.”

Omega peered far, far down, and his massive face wrinkled in concern when he caught sight of the truck. 

“Do you mind turning back into ship mode? I need the medbay.” 

Ratchet hated doing the very thing he railed against the Council for, treating Omega like a tool, but there was a life on the line. That Omega never minded being called to be of service and possibly even enjoyed it didn’t make him feel any worse about making such a request. Sentinels were built with a fundamentally flawed sense of self-preservation, after all, though the technicians who worked on them had euphemistically referred to this feature as a protective measure. With the Sentinels so busy being responsible for Autobot safety there was accordingly no room to be concerned for their own. 

He pushed these reservations out of his mind and allowed triage routines to assume control of the logic centre. There was a simplicity in tackling one problem after another that made even the riskiest surgery a manageable task, and Ratchet lost himself in the minutiae of attending to the various repairs this poor mech would need before they could even walk again. 

Ratchet started by sawing open the truck’s chassis to access the T-cog. Under less pressing circumstances he would have carefully dismantled the external plates and detached inessential wires, but his patient didn’t have the luxury of time. If the truck survived they could complain about ugly welds later. Ratchet cringed as he pried off the chunk of armor. During the war the field surgeries he conducted were nearly indistinguishable from back alley hack jobs, and this situation was terribly familiar. He didn’t spare the breath to apologise as he delved into the mech’s internals. At least this time nobody was sending live fire his way. 

Omega stayed quiet as Ratchet worked. In a real operating suite Ratchet would have nurses to mop away the dark splotches on the floor formed by spent energon. Whatever had happened to the patient was worse than anything he had seen in a long, long time. Was it a holiday jaunt gone wrong? There were organics who questioned the validity of mechanical life, and found nothing unethical about treating Cybertronians very badly. Ratchet wanted to check if the truck’s code had been tampered with. 

“You can, ah, look away now, Omega. I’m going to access the patient’s ports.” The truck’s medical channel was too badly damaged for Ratchet to use, leading him to have no other choice but to pry open the main one. “If anything happens I’d be sure to tell you.” 

A slight pause, and the interior cameras in the ceiling politely folded away. 

This invisible damage was perhaps even worse than the external injuries Ratchet had been fixing earlier. Someone had pared away information packets and bundled protocols without bothering to separate inessential segments from core programming, resulting in a nightmarish mess that would take days to untangle, and that estimate was only given should he manage to bring the patient to a real hospital. The mech’s code had been taken apart by a butcher who would rather they lose vital components rather than remember something important, something incriminating that the saboteur obviously didn’t want them to. Ratchet found himself quickly getting lost in error strings and stalled processes, swimming against the overwhelming urge to flee. He located the language control centre and reactivated the vocaliser unit. Perhaps they would be able to tell him what had happened. 

“No,” the mech was saying, and even as Ratchet’s internal memory base found a match for that harsh, raspy voice, Ratchet was already decrypting the ident and automatically drawing away, consumed with horror that he had—saved Lockdown’s life. The very last person Ratchet would have been willing to plug into because of completely legitimate medical necessity, maybe even after Megatron, except it was not a theoretically awful scenario since his plug was well and truly snugly fitted into Lockdown’s socket. “Don’t,” Lockdown gasped, and he didn’t need to complete the sentence for Ratchet could readily access the wellspring of relief pouring out from the other mech. He’d been so alone, in the dark, for what felt like eons, that the touch of another mech was like an irresistible flare. Ratchet’s medical code automatically sought for ways to ease this emotional distress while his own conscience compulsively slammed neural gateways open and shut. He had already restored the bounty hunter to normal functioning. Providing further assistance would only make his own feelings on the matter even messier. Still, no matter how he tried to rationalise things, medicine wasn’t a zero-sum game. Repairing Lockdown wasn’t actively harming anyone. Only Ratchet’s guilt worsened as the seconds ticked by and the numbers scrolled down his HUD, letting him see just how well his former enemy was recovering under his care. 

Ratchet knew that no charge was being conducted between their frames in the absence of a reciprocal connection and more importantly any form of desire, but his cable still felt strangely tingly where it hung in space. 

“Do you know who I am,” Ratchet asked, angry. Lockdown’s optics were spun all the way down, the blank stare shared by soldiers stumbling out of trenches from long ago. His vents came in short, convulsive starts, and all of a sudden Ratchet realised that the mech was caught in the grips of a bad defrag. It was symptomatic of being overwhelmed by an energy boost following a long period of deprivation wherein the brain module pulled power to reactive and reorganize shut-down processes. If Ratchet unplugged straight away the abrupt disconnect would very possibly lead to systems failure. 

Ratchet cursed. Lockdown moaned some more, the wicked claws of his hands flexing and unflexing rapidly. Telling Omega to stop monitoring them was turning out to be a very good decision, and quite possibly the last time where Ratchet demonstrated good judgement. 

Moving quickly made Ratchet think less critically about what he was doing. It was short work to assume authority over Lockdown’s motor control and slide open Lockdown’s access panel. Actually forcing himself to unspool the other mech’s cable took a great deal more willpower. Establishing a two-way connection wasn’t strictly necessary though it would make the process a lot easier. Interfacing was originally intended as a method of data exchange, after all. There wasn’t anything wrong with using his cables for this purpose. He ignored the automatic surge of excitement that came when Lockdown’s jack slotted into his socket. Lockdown didn’t even seem to register that a connection had been made. Pulsing assurance, and comfort, Ratchet managed to make the defrag more bearable. Once Lockdown’s turbines stopped whining, the rest was easy. Starting with the more basic, simple routines Lockdown had lost, Ratchet transferred an increasingly large volume of files needed to restore memory, movement and other functions. Ratchet tried to go as quickly as he could without skipping anything important, and by the time Lockdown had completely calmed down and was running fractionally less damaged code in his head, the medic was shaking from exhaustion. 

He just remembered to put Lockdown in the brig before stumbling into recharge mode on the floor. Lockdown went into the cell without resistance, and drank the extra energon placed beside him quietly. 

Ratchet woke up because of an annoying repetitive motion jabbing him in the side. 

“Nrrrnghk,” he said, until higher consciousness kicked in and allowed him to identify the tentacle Omega Supreme had extruded from the wall. 

“Sorry, but I thought you’d like to know that the mech has come online. Is he a prisoner, Ratchet?”

“Yup,” Ratchet muttered, already making his way to the brig. “Good thinking.” 

The glowing bars formed dark pools of shadow on Lockdown’s hunched frame. He was crouched on the ground, limbs tucked underneath him. If Ratchet didn’t know how much of a vicious killer the mech was he would have reckoned that Lockdown was trying to make himself smaller. 

“Any weapons you got hidden away, surrender them now,” Ratchet snapped. “I said now! Listen to me, Con.” 

Crimson eyes dimmed and glowed again. 

“W-what,” Lockdown finally mumbled. 

“Weapons in subspace, or anything really.” Ratchet was aching all over and feeling every one of his several million years. He had no patience for this dumb act. 

“Come on, you had a ton of gadgets the last time we met. Don’t tell me you gave them all away to some buddies.”

Lockdown gaped at Ratchet some more. The look of blank incomprehension on his scarred face was getting truly disturbing. Was the damage to his processor that bad? Ratchet finally settled for remotely scanning Lockdown’s subspace and discovered that the Decepticon was well and truly empty-handed. In fact, he didn’t have a single bullet on him. After a while Lockdown’s gaze drifted away and he started humming some tuneless melody, the noise grating on Ratchet’s audials. 

“Shut up,” Ratchet growled. “Is this some kind of sick joke? Someone did a number on you but I won’t hesitate to finish the job, understand?” 

Lockdown scooted back until he was pressed flush against the wall. He was completely silent now, and even his vents were coming softer. 

“Ratchet,” Omega Supreme’s deep voice rumbled, “he doesn’t look very dangerous.” 

“Oh, trust me on this, Lockdown’s one slimy mech all right. He’s a murderer, Omega. A murderer and a thief and someone more crooked than Rodion’s alleyways!” 

Ratchet’s damning proclamation positively rang off the walls. 

“I haven’t been to Rodion,” Omega said uncomfortably. 

“It’s okay, I’d bring you there one day. Or at least you could fly over to look.”

Lockdown didn’t seem to notice the commotion at all. He had hung his head so low it was straining the cables in his neck, and the unfamiliar lines of his modified frame were all bunched together until he had nearly formed a compact ball. If Ratchet scrubbed hard enough, would the Decepticon emblem be revealed? 

“I’d be keeping an eye on you,” Ratchet said venomously. There wasn’t a need for him to stay at Omega’s controls, the Sentinel was perfectly capable of piloting himself. 

Dragging a chair down to the tiny brig took out the last of Ratchet’s energy. He flopped onto the seat and resolved to stay awake until they reached Cybertron and Lockdown could be handed over to the enforcers. Lockdown didn’t seem to notice the surveillance, and dozed off in alt mode. He was a low-slung lorry now, the kind that transported fresh produce and other goods at the market Ratchet had visited earlier. Innocuous, ordinary and completely uncharacteristic of the arrogant bounty hunter. 

Maybe Ratchet had been too quick to judge, remember all the bad history they shared. Perhaps Omega was right and Lockdown didn’t pose a threat. Ratchet went to the comms console and messaged Optimus, flagging it as high-priority. 

“Ratchet! I’m so happy to see you, everyone who talks to me at work wants me to deal with something for them.” 

“Sorry to disappoint, kid. I need a favour.” Skimming over the reason he’d gone off-planet, Ratchet gave Optimus a quick summary of the situation. That he had interfaced with Lockdown was also left unsaid, of course. 

“You know about the Council’s idea of justice,” Optimus finally said, unable to look Ratchet in the eye. “Are you really sure about bringing Lockdown back?”

“He needs access to proper medical facilities. I’ve gotten him stabilised for now, but there’s no telling if his condition will take a nosedive. And he has um, been altered beyond recognition now. Appearance-wise and beyond, he doesn’t look like a Decepticon anymore. All you need to do is help me falsify a new ident.” 

There wasn’t any point in healing someone who would only be put to death by the Council, like what had happened to the Decepticons Optimus and the crew had hauled back all those years ago. 

Optimus still looked unconvinced. Ratchet transmitted a live feed of the interior of the cell, letting Optimus see what had happened to the bounty hunter for himself. 

They orbited the planet for a bit while Optimus fiddled with the details, and then Omega was touching down at the spaceport. Prior to this trip, Ratchet hadn’t figured on bringing back any illegal cargo other than the compound sliding around in his subspace. He just hoped this mercy wasn’t misplaced. 

“Move it,” he said, and tugged Lockdown along on the chain crudely welded around his neck. It also bound his hands together behind his back. 

“Goodbye, Omega,” Ratchet called, and then he was heading off with the Decepticon in tow.

**Author's Note:**

> don't worry ratchet is gonna conduct more therapeutic sex sessions to get lockie's spunky personality back


End file.
